RBE WIKI for INDEPENDENT LEARNING Interactive Qualifying
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RBE WIKI FOR INDEPENDENT LEARNING Interactive Qualifying Project Report completed in partial fulfillment of the Bachelor of Science degree at Worcester Polytechnic Institute, Worcester, MA Submitted to: Professor Michael Gennert (advisor) Timon Butler Jonathan Estabrook Joseph Funk James Kingsley Ryan O’Meara April 26, 2011 Advisor Signature Abstract This project, which performed research on web based academic resources, revolved around the focus question “how does one utilize web-based communication media in order to facilitate the self-perpetuating exchange of knowledge in the academic engineering community?”. It exam- ined the social implications of self-sustaining web-based resources, and found that any new web resource needs to fill a previously vacant niche in order to gather the user-base required to be self-sustaining. Acknowledgements The members of the RBE Wiki for Independent Learning Interactive Qualifying Project would like to extend thanks to the students, teaching assistants, and professors of the Worcester Polytech- nic Institute Robotics Program for their time, input and feedback related to the Uki website. Also to our roommates for dealing with the erratic schedules we adopted to complete this project, and to our advisor Professor Michael Gennert for advising this project and helping us turn a simple idea we had into something which has the potential to greatly benefit the WPI community. So again thank you for all of your help from the Uki team. 2 Authorship The RBE Wiki for Independent Learning Interactive Qualifying Project was carried out by five individuals: Timon Butler, Jonathan Estabrook, Joseph Funk, James Kingsley, and Ryan O’Meara. The project as a whole accomplished what it did based upon the efforts of the group as a whole. Specific task leadership was assigned to particular members, as outlined below. Primary User Audience Data Collection Timon Butler Back End Server Operations Jonathan Estabrook James Kingsley Front End Site Operations Jonathan Estabrook Ryan O’Meara Base Site Content Joseph Funk Ryan O’Meara Final Project Report Timon Butler Jonathan Estabrook Joseph Funk James Kingsley Ryan O’Meara 3 Contents 1 Introduction 1 2 Background 4 2.1 RationalefortheProject . ..... 4 2.2 CurrentStateofWebBasedResources . ....... 5 2.2.1 ArticleBasedResources . .. 5 2.2.2 PreviousResearch .............................. 10 2.2.3 PreviousSolutions . .. .. .. .. .. .. .. .. 12 3 Methodology 14 3.1 FocusGroups ..................................... 15 3.2 Survey......................................... 15 3.3 CreationofServer................................ ... 16 3.4 ConstructionoftheSite. ..... 17 3.5 AdditionofBaseContent. .... 17 3.6 ToolSet........................................ 18 3.7 Responsibility,PrivacyandSecurityIssues . ............. 19 4 Procedure 22 4.1 FocusGroups ..................................... 22 4.2 Surveys ........................................ 23 i 4.3 Research........................................ 24 4.4 CreationofServer................................ ... 24 4.5 ConstructionoftheSite. ..... 26 4.6 ReleasetoTestUserGroup. .... 26 5 Results 28 5.1 Surveys ........................................ 28 5.2 UserMotivation.................................. .. 29 5.3 EaseofUsevsVolumeofContent . .... 29 5.4 EffectivelySpreadingtheUserBase . ........ 31 5.5 EffectiveSourcesforContent. ....... 31 5.6 DifficultieswiththisResource . ....... 32 5.7 AdvantagestothisResource . ..... 33 5.8 SelectionofPrimarySupportedMedia . ........ 33 6 Conclusion 35 6.0.1 LessonsLearned ............................... 35 6.0.2 FinalRemarks ................................ 37 7 Recommendations 38 7.1 NotestoConsider................................. .. 39 A HowToUseUki 40 A.1 LocalSettings................................... .. 40 A.2 Extensions...................................... 40 A.3 Server/DatabaseOperations. ....... 41 A.4 SiteOrganization ................................ ... 41 A.4.1 Portals .................................... 42 A.4.2 Namespaces.................................. 42 ii A.5 ArticleFormatting ............................... ... 43 A.6 Analytics ....................................... 43 B Focus Group Data 46 C Survey Data 52 iii List of Figures 2.1 WikipediaArticleCountOverTime[15] . ........ 8 2.2 SampleLayoutofaTypicalWikiPage[15] . ....... 9 A.1 AtypicalportalonUki ............................. ... 42 A.2 AnarticlefromUki................................ .. 43 A.3 HeatmapOverlayofUkiMainPage . .... 44 A.4 DashboardforOpenWebAnalytics . ..... 45 iv List of Tables v Chapter 1 Introduction Information is what allows humanity, as a whole, to move forward from today to tomorrow. We as a race are constantly building new knowledge using old knowledge as a starting point. With the advent of the Internet and new ways to store and retrieve information, knowledge can be retrieved faster and in higher volumes than ever before. The sheer volume of information, opinions, and discussions presented can easily surpass the amount a human can possibly process. This overwhelming amount of available information can lead to something called “information overload” [23]. Without a way to intelligently access and view content, it is difficult for a user to find relevant information amid the sea of available data. Web resources must address this problem when they wish to provide information to their users, and the approach will differ based on the target audience the site is designed for. As much information as is available on the web, in printed media, and in classroom environ- ments, it must be organized into manageable subject divisions in order to be useful. Either this must be done on a single site internally, or be done through searching for information more effec- tively, which is the approach taken by search engines such as Google[5]. However, even searching for information better is not effective if a site is not organized in a useful way. Searching can only infer so many related subjects from a single search query. As a result, this project chose to focus on the organization of a single web-based resource that encompasses the needs of a specific commu- 1 nity. This being effective entails either reorganizing a massive number of web resources, libraries, and classroom plans, or converting information into a common format and organizing the infor- mation as it is being converted. This, in turn, presents the problem of converting massive amounts of data into a common format. In the context of web based resources, there are two common methods for this. The first is used by curated resources, such as the Encyclopedia Britannica[4], where a few approved people are entrusted to enter information which is written to a high literary standard. This is currently accepted as the safer option by the larger academic community. The second method is to let the information be compiled and refined by the very community that uses the resource. Perhaps the largest and most well known example of this approach is Wikipedia[15]. When this method works, the community regulates and corrects its own errors, and through this process constantly improves the quality and presentation of the resources content. Each of these methods are effective techniques to solve the problems of information overload. As a result of these problems, our group questioned how effectively existing information re- sources can be used for practical applications, particularly by engineers. Specifically, how does one utilize web-based communication media in order to facilitate the self-perpetuating exchange of knowledge in the academic engineering community? Our project seeks to perform a study on web based resources which are run by a user base interested in information on engineering topics. Questions the project sought to answer included the specific format which is best suited to pre- senting information to such an audience, how to encourage a resource for this audience to become self-perpetuating, and the positives and negatives of such an approach. Our main vehicle for this endeavour was a case study using a wiki web resource to store knowl- edge relating to the various engineering fields studied at Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI). The initial target for this resource was the Robotics Engineering Program, as it encompasses a wide engineering subject base. The resource created was based on the MediaWiki platform [9], which is the basis for similar websites such as Wikipedia. Our project created a platform called Uki, then added a small amount of content, a tool set, and an organizational framework. It was then released to our target audience. Our group conducted surveys of the target audience after the 2 resource had been released to gauge our site and the opinions of the users on what would be the most useful qualities for this type of resource. Our group anticipated the project to result in a small but growing web resource for the WPI Robotics Engineering Program, which would eventually expand to encompass an increasing num- ber of the engineering disciplines studied at WPI and other universities. Further, our group ex- pected a large quantity of data on how the web resource was used during our study, and what format students of engineering disciplines find most useful when searching for information in a web based resource. The importance of this project lies in its potential to be a model for similar resources, which would allow more web based resources tailored to their audiences to be created. This could result in a more centralized knowledge